


Lasting Day

by xaritomene



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Killjoys, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-25
Updated: 2013-03-25
Packaged: 2017-12-06 10:13:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/734511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xaritomene/pseuds/xaritomene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set after the 'Sing' video, and it feels oddly appropriate to post it now, so.</p>
<p>
  <i>Their lives now are always somewhere on the seven stages of grief, and each day is another step, forwards or back.</i>
</p>
<p>They died, but didn't, and you always need some time to pick up the pieces after a death.</p>
<p>
  <span class="small">This was originally intended to be a longer fic, but while it cuts off rather abruptly at the end, it's not a completely bizarre place to end it.</span>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lasting Day

The kid’s probably heading for full-blown survivor’s guilt, Show Pony thinks, but he doesn’t feel he knows her well enough to reach out and say anything to her, help her get past it without falling too far into it. Dr. Death might have more luck, and Before, Pony might have felt OK about comforting a child. But it’s not the same anymore. Anyway, she’s always been the Killjoy kid, an anomaly even in a world as strange as this, a kid running with a group like the Killjoys. And Pony remembers what it felt like, having a whole support system ripped away from him, and this is (at least) the second she’s lost. It’s got to be hitting her hard.

She’s staring straight ahead, lips pressed tight together (she looks so much older like that, and Pony get a glimpse of what she might look like when she’s older, if she gets much older). Her hair’s wilder even than usual, and in the eerie, half-dawn light, her eyes look very pale, almost colourless.

She hasn’t cried yet. Pony isn’t sure she will.

Only Doc D knows her name, and it’s not real subtle to ask him for it whilst the kid’s sat right there. She’s wedged between the Doc and Pony and somehow manages not to touch either of them, so upright, so contained. It’s irrational, he knows, but until Pony finds out her name, he doesn’t feel like he can reach out and talk to her. He only knows her as the Killjoy kid, and the Killjoys are dead. She needs a new name for him to call her, a new space in his head to inhabit, and until he can get those things sorted, he doesn’t want to mess things up – mess her up, mess _himself_ up – by reaching out to her. 

He’s part of a resistance movement which relies on selflessness from all of them, but it’s just taught him to be selfish is sneakier ways. Inside his own head, he’ll allow himself this. He’ll even allow himself a little white lie – just to himself. He’ll let himself get away with pretending that it’s got nothing to do with the way he’s still reeling from the Killjoys’ deaths himself, and nothing at all to do with how much this kid, this little girl, unnerves him. (None of the other resistance groups have kids tagging along, and no one’s been able to work out why the Killjoys didn’t dump her and move on, the same way anyone else would have. There are rumours, mutterings, about whose daughter she is, and whilst most people go for Jet Star, there’s a small, but vocal group claiming it’s gotta be Party Poison. Pony mostly shakes his head and ignores it, treating it just like the celebrity gossip he’d so completely ignored long before the Disaster. This is pretty much the resistance version of celebrity gossip.)

She still hasn’t said anything, and the Killjoys are still dead. That iconic Trans-Am is probably being stripped down for parts right now, and BL/ind probably have them all in smiley-faced body-bags. Pony carefully doesn’t shudder as they leave Battery City behind them, bland and white, the sun rising slow and straight into their eyes as they drive.

**

When Party Poison opens his eyes again, he takes a couple of seconds to realise that he’s done so. It’s still dark, and when he tries to sit up, he realises he’s in a straitjacket, and also that the ceiling’s a lot closer than he’d expected – maybe just inches above his head. He can’t touch anything to see where he is, or whether he can get out, but he thinks, maybe, he’s lying on metal. A gurney? In a straitjacket?

The realisation is a little bit like ice creeping up his spine and settling in his stomach. He’s fooled for a moment, because it’s not really cold, but it takes him maybe twenty seconds to work out that he’s in a morgue drawer, and it freaks the fuck out of him.

He yells, because he can, but the sound is unbearable in the tiny – so tiny, too tiny – space, bouncing back at him and making his ears ring. His eyes are watering, and the sound is far, far too much for him, but he yells again, because it’s not sterile, it’s a proof to himself that he’s _alive_ , even packed away in a fucking drawer, a fucking refrigerator for human bodies. 

When he can’t yell anymore (and he’ll never say to anyone but Mikey – Kobra, _Kobra_ – that it’s because he was crying too hard, terror and the shock of being dead layered under the shock of _not_ being dead), he keeps muttering to himself, the filthiest swear words he knows, turning the air blue because this place can only improve with a bit of colour.

He wonders whether Kobra and Ghoul and Jet Star are still alive, and he hopes they all got away OK with Grace. (But he knows his brother and he knows Frank and Ray and if they saw him go down (when they saw him go down), they weren’t going to let that go. So fucking stupid, letting himself get cornered like that by Korse. If they’re dead – he doesn’t follow that thought. _He_ was dead, and he doesn’t know why he’s not. It’s so, so possible that they’re not either. What’s a hundred percent certain is that no one will tell him they’re alive, regardless of what is actually the truth. BL/ind has always been economical with the truth.) 

He’s still muttering to himself when they open the drawer (though who the hell knows how much later that is. Gerard has no idea how long it’s been). Let them think he’s mad. He wraps the Party Poison persona around himself like a blanket and smiles up at Korse with wide eyes, smiling mouth still dripping a litany of curses.

A couple of Dracs pick him up and turn him over, then someone is undoing the straitjacket, rolling him over again and yanking it off none-too-gently. He stops his mindless recitation – invocation – of curse words when he’s rolled right off the draw shelf onto his hands and knees, the tile biting into his palms. (At least he knows he’s not going to stored back in there just yet.)

(He’s not in his jeans anymore, his leather jacket nowhere to be seen. Instead, he’s in loose white cotton pants and a shirt. His hair is still the same, though, greasy, bright-red clumps hanging down in front of his eyes.)

“Come on, Gerard,” Korse says, polite, charming, (out-of-character), every word like gravel on glass. “It would take so much more than a little thing like resurrection for you to go mad.”

Gerard finds his legs won’t hold him, and he collapses against the morgue drawer. “Where’s Jet Star?” he asks instead of answering. “You fucking tell me where Jet Star is, or I will fucking kill you, you motherfucking _prick_.” He makes a point of asking after a different person first every time they have a run in like this. Any sign of a preference would be like blood in the water for a man like Korse.

Korse doesn’t bother answering him, just slides open the drawer next to Gerard’s. It’s Frank, and Gerard stumbles as the shelf he’d been leaning on was slammed back into place, falling against Frank.

It’s clearly him. Everything’s too perfect to be a fake, a replica, and he’s just as clearly dead, skin cold and still. There’s no pulse, no breath.

Gerard’s breath seems to have frozen too and it takes everything he has not to stroke a hand down Frank’s cheek, not to let himself crack and cry. 

Instead he glances up at Korse and then back and Frankie and then away again, focussing on the dull gleam of the gurney, bright in the sterile light. There’s no point hiding how upset he is, but the least he can do is give Frank some dignity in death, and that means keeping himself together. He’s the last repository of everything that made up Frank, all Gerard’s memories the last bit of Frank left here. (He’s suddenly, desperately, wishing it was Mikey he could see. He’d like to see his brother again, in whatever form – if this is all he can get of him, he’ll take it. The thought feels like an abomination.) He has to keep it together.

The message from Korse is clear. Gerard asked after Jet Star and they showed him Fun Ghoul. Korse had to know, to be banking on the fact that Gerard would make the leap, and make it he does.

He does reach out to touch Frank then, and wishes he’d done it earlier as they pull him away, wishes he’d given him one last less clinical touch, hadn’t just felt for a pulse then kept his hands to himself. He goes with them easily because there’s nothing to save, nothing to fight for right now.

But then Korse is following him out and saying, “get rid of the body” over his shoulder, and Gerard loses what little control he had. He’s screaming again before he knows it, a horrible, burning mix of obscenities and grief, and every word seems to rip a little more of himself away with it. 

**

The first thing they do is shave his head, one blank faceless drac holding his head back and the other wielding a straight razor, hacking his hair off in clumps. Gerard doesn’t dare move because he can deal with losing his hair – it’ll grow back, it’s fine – but he doesn’t know what’s coming and he’d rather not lose an ear, or end up with his throat cut. Everyone he really loved may be dead (except Grace, thank god), but there are still things to fight for, and still things worth living for, and if he’s slated to die (again), he’s not going to rush it just yet. 

Their lives now are always somewhere on the seven stages of grief, and each day is another step, forwards or back.


End file.
